Burger & Barrel and Venieros Pastry

Manhattan is really a miserable place to live, so when I really hate it, I go to a really chic restaurant so I feel like I'm living in a romantic comedy.

At Burger & Barrel, I got beef tartare, which is raw ground beef mixed with various condiments. This was really good; the seasoning was very simple and didn't overwhelm the meat. The beef itself was very rich, so the escarole, capers, and pickled radish balanced it very well.

Is it weird to get so excited about toasted bread? I feel like most restaurants can't get toasted bread right; it's usually too thin and flimsy, or not charred enough. However, the toasted bread that came with this was so perfect. It's the perfect dense texture, charred, and buttered.

I also got duck lasagna. The edges of the noodles were really crispy, which was pretty interesting. Although the duck was very tender, the dish was just very bland. Although there's tomato sauce underneath, the lasagna itself is filled with very basic bechamel sauce (basically white cream sauce), which really masks the flavor of the duck. The only time I actually tasted the duck was when I burped 20 minutes later.

I'm really starting to wonder if I can get good truffle fries anywhere in New York. I've had some pretty incredible truffle fries (like at Umami Burger), but this one was just plain fries with three drops of truffle oil sprinkled on top. Once you eat through the top layer, the truffle essence is gone.

I was getting pretty sad towards the middle of the meal (yes, food can make me sad) so I decided not to stay for dessert. Instead, I went to my favorite pastry shop, Venieros in East Village.

Venieros has the most fantastic pastries and cakes. I got tiramisu cake, which is a big wedge of chocolate cream with small chunks of cake in it. It's just a delicious, fatty dessert that's not too heavy and always makes me happy.

The best part of being 21 is being able to drink alcohol mixed with coffee in a public place. I ordered Bailey's Irish Cream coffee, which is exactly what it sounds like. Bailey's itself tastes like chocolate milk, so this just tastes like an alcoholic mocha, which is never a bad thing.

Burger & Barrel
25 W Houston St
http://www.burgerandbarrel.com/

Venieros Pasticceria
342 E 11th St
http://www.venierospastry.com/

Donato Enoteca

I love happy accident discoveries! We were on our way to another restaurant... when we found out it was closed on Sundays (why do restaurants do that? They're just killing their business). We were determined to eat ASAP, so we Yelped furiously and found a place nearby.

Our first appetizer was grilled calamari--remember, if you want fried calamari, it's "calamari fritti" in Italian. I really liked this--it's so tender--but they cooked it so that the calamari's juices stay inside. This makes it taste like the ocean, which I love, but it can be really fishy.

Our second appetizer was braised wild boar bruschetta, which was basically a really gamey pulled pork. The boar was really cooked really simply--with a lot of tomato--and it was very tender, but I wish the bread was thicker and a little bit charred, so it would be a little tougher. The bread was slightly toasted but way too soft, and got really soggy from the boar.

I got the bigoli pasta with oxtail. I love the texture of this pasta--it's like tagliatelle, but thicker and coarser. This super dense texture is so unusual, but I wish more restaurants would use it! The oxtail was really tender, but it was all in shreds, so you get smatterings of its flavor throughout the pasta. Although it might not be as satisfying without big chunks of meat, it makes the dish a lot lighter, but you still get just as much flavor.

My boyfriend got the buckwheat pasta with mushrooms. The pasta is in large ribbons, which really accentuates the grittiness of the buckwheat--it's hard to grind buckwheat very finely, but the grit wouldn't be very apparent in thinner noodles, like soba. The mushroom flavor was good, but I didn't find that it was really different from that of other mushroom pastas.

Apparently this is how my boyfriend takes food photographs.
It's "artistic."

I was really torn between two desserts... the tiramisu and chocolate fondant. I think I made the right choice! All tiramisus are really flavorful, but a big problem I have with a lot of them is that the cake gets really soggy from sitting in the espresso all day and then it all becomes all one moist, too-soft texture. This one, though, wasn't soaked through with espresso, and each layer was nice and separated.

Donato Enoteca
1041 Middlefield Rd
http://www.donatoenoteca.com/